Coming soon: the real-life Iron Giant

The robot's left hand is equipped with two BB Gatling guns and can shoot 6,000 ball bearings per minute

Michinori Aoki

This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of
Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print
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This four-metre tall, 4.5-tonne mega-machine is
Kuratas, a robot that you can drive. You can make
it wheel from place to place, move its arms to shoot out fireworks
and BB pellets, and even grab objects.

"I wanted to ride in a giant robot.
But nothing was being built except small robots like [Honda's]
ASIMO," says its creator, Japanese artist Kogoro Kurata. "I
couldn't wait any longer and thought, 'I'll build one myself.'"
Kuratas, which was revealed at the Wonder Festival in Japan last
July, is mostly built from parts of a power shovel and moves on
wheels. "For Kuratas's control system, I tried a few things --
using remote control via iPod Touch, reflecting human movement
using Kinect -- but in the end a control stick proved most
suitable," says Wataru Yoshizaki, the PhD student at the Nara
Institute of Science and Technology who coded the software
controlling Kuratas. "I'd like to develop it so that it can make
subtle movements via a handle shaped like a human
arm."

The cockpit has space for one adult.
Inside there's a large LCD screen, on which you can monitor scenes
captured by video cameras attached to the front and back of the
robot. You can also launch a camera-equipped drone (a four-axis
helicopter), which gives you a bird's-eye view of your
surroundings.

This prototype took about three
years to build, and there are more models in the works.
Honshu-based Kurata, and Yoshizaki, plan to build a cheaper,
easy-to-use version. The commercial prototype is nearly complete
and will sell for 100 million yen (around £680,000), according to
its creators. We're going to need a biggertoy-box.